Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday September 12, 2006 @10:38PM
from the call-that-a-hack? dept.

mytrip writes, "The Democratic rival to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged that his aides were responsible for obtaining a controversial audio file, in which the Governator was heard disparaging members of other races, in a move that has led to allegations of Web site hacking. A source close to Angelides told CNET News.com that it was possible to 'chop' off the Web links and visit the higher-level 'http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/' directory, which had the controversial audio recording publicly viewable. No password was needed, the source said." And jchernia notes, "As an aside, the California Highway Patrol is running the investigation — maybe the Internet is a truck after all."

"I mean Cuban, Puerto Rican, they are all very hot," the governor says on the recording. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."

the article continues...

'Garcia, who is Puerto Rican and the only Latina Republican in the assembly, appeared with Schwarzenegger yesterday and said she was not offended by the governor's comments. Garcia earlier told the Times that she refers to herself a "hot-blooded Latina."

"I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am," she said.'

I vaguely remember someone in the UK that was convicted of the computer equivalent of trespass for doing something like this: manually removing the trailing elements in a URL.

When the GST (tax) was launched here in 2000 the tax department had a web site where you could query something about your tax and the cgi script it used had an argument like ?tfn=nnnnnnn where the n's are your tax file number (9 digits).

So this guy tried a couple of combinations, got the details of others, and took it to the tax people with advice to change their security arrangements.

No, that's the way normal human beings interact. Only people who have never really spent much time in a diverse, multiethnic environment get offended by such things... the rest of us tease each other constantly and have a grand old time.

"I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am," she said.'

Yeah, except when he hides behind his ESL-credentials and says things like: "I never took steroids, besides, they weren't illegal when I took them." or "I believe that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman."

Personally, the guy who promised to come in as governor and apply fiscal discipline to solve California's budget crisis - and the first thing he does is put out a measure to borrow 8 billion dollars;

Straight-talking is not an appropriate description.

I don't have a problem with what he said candidly, off the record, behind closed doors, in his office, particularly since there is a personal backstory with rep Garcia.

But Schwartzenegger isn't anything close to a straight talker. He's your typical corporate-lobbyist stooge, just like all the rest. Including Angelides.

For those to whom the parent is not clear, the California Highway Patrol has, for quite some time, subsumed the function of the formerly-separate California State Police, and also has a function with regard to the Governor (and, IIRC, certain other state officers) parallel to the protective role of the federal Secret Service.

So its not all that odd that the CHP is running the investigation, other than the fact that there is obviously nothing illegal about accessing publicly-served pages from someone's webserver, so there shouldn't be an "investigation" at all.

You do realize that he is up for re-election in November, and that his major opponent is none other than the person who passed the information on to the LA Times? And that the LA Times went on to quote Phil Angeledies as being very outraged, in the same article that they broke the story. Those of us in California, with more than half a brain (which does eliminate a large portion of the state's population), realized it for what it was: election year mud-slinging. The LA Times is generally expected to be a left slanted newspaper, and they do what they can to attack Schwarzenegger at any possible time. So, running a story, on the front page, about an off-color comment, made in a closed door meeting, (which didn't even offend the person who was being talked about. She actually took it as a point of pride, being called "hot blooded.") is absolutly no suprise.

The problem begins right after all of that. Stereotypes aren't necessarily "bad" when they can be demonstrated statistically. The real problem is when people make the leap from "greater than 50% of example-race is something" to "100% of example-race is something" without even considering that there may be exceptions or, even worse, not believing an exception when they actually encounter one. You may (emphasis on may) be able to show statistically that Latino women as a group are more aggressive or confrontational than white women, but anyone smarter than a rock should be able to acknowledge and accept any exceptions.

This isn't a problem with stereotypes, but rather with general ignorance, i.e. the notion that populations are homogeneous, when in most respects they tend to be very far from so. At the same time, they are often statistically different in various respects from one another, and there is no contradiction here.

I think the origin of the unfortunate fallacy of racial homogeneity (at least in the West) is probably skin colour. When comparing Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, skin colour is a simple characteristic that is essentially universal within each population (i.e. there are no ethnic Europeans with black skin, and no Sub-Saharan Africans with white skin, except perhaps albinos). Most human traits, however, are not simple ones like skin colour, and result from much more complex genetic combinations, together with at least some environmental influences. As such, they tend to vary greatly within populations, and even if there are often statistically significant differences amongst populations, there is typically considerable overlap from one to the next.

An example of the above that I like to use is differences in height between Europeans and Orientals. It can be statistically shown that Europeans are taller than Orientals, but anyone with eyes can see that this is not universal. It can also very easily be seen that height is not homogeneous within populations. As such, the fact that it can be said with some validity that 'Europeans are tall' and 'Orientals are short', it is overwhelmingly clear that there are any number of short Europeans and tall Orientals, and that anyone who claims race is a perfect predictor of height is speaking utter nonsense.